A few years ago, people who felt betrayed by the future suddenly gained a new rallying cry. After a lifetime of promises about robots and flying cars, we started to wonder: "Where's my jetpack?" Since then, the jokey slogan has found itself appearing everywhere from T-shirts to songs.

It's a jab in the eye of every futurist who made firm predictions about what we'll see in generations to come, and it's easy to laugh at the fools who dreamed of such frivolities. After all, merely guessing at the future is a fundamentally foolish business. That doesn't mean that we can't understand what is coming tomorrow, however, and prepare for the most likely futures by understanding how things happened in the past.

That is where the rich history of the Guardian's technology pages becomes more than just an archive of old newspapers. Over nearly 30 years, there have been titanic changes in the way we view and use technologies. We've seen computers move toward the centre of our lives, much of our food is engineered, families can be created in a lab and keeping in touch is cheaper and easier – regardless of whether we do it physically or virtually. So what should we expect from the next decade?

Of all the trends that will dominate our lives in the coming years, computing is the one that has set the standard – and followed distinct rules along the way.

The unending influence of Moore's law (a formulation that is both so beautiful and so ubiquitous that it has taken on an almost Shakespearean quality) dictates that our computers will become more powerful and less expensive as time goes on.

This will mean, for starters, machines capable of ever-increasing feats of power: lifelike graphics, smarter understanding, greater intelligence. "Singularity" advocates such as Ray Kurzweil believe this will end in sentient computers – and while that is almost certainly excessive, we are already seeing extraordinary leaps in what machines can do. Academics are now crunching everything from terabytes of data pouring out of the Large Hadron Collider to data pushed to PlayStations to scour the universe for alien life.

With ever-increasing amounts of computing power to throw at complex problems, the ideas that have baffled scientists and engineers for decades may finally start to emerge from the darkness. That opens up the chance of high-quality visual recognition systems and accurate translations that work so fast they resemble acts of magic.

The trends set by Moore's law also mean that even the smallest devices will pack an increasingly powerful punch. Today, an iPhone contains the same amount of computing power as a Mac from 10 years ago; soon enough our handsets will enjoy the same processing power and capabilities as the high-end desktop computers we use now.

Look to the clouds

There is also an argument, however, that gadgets will become less powerful rather than more. Why? Because the immense computational power at our fingertips will also be available on demand thanks to cloud computing. With storage, memory and connectivity also advancing at a rapid clip, the built-in capabilities of your gadgets become less important than their ability to connect to a more powerful machine elsewhere.

And if the real brain of your phone or TV or games console can be squirrelled away somewhere else, many consumer electronics might simply become screens that plug into the network and present you with the appropriate information. These developments could easily ramp up as those screens continue to evolve to become cheaper, lighter, thinner, more flexible and more robust.

In addition to the gadgets we carry or use in the home, the plummeting cost of computers means it is almost certain that more of our world -– the things we touch, we build, we grow – will be able to incorporate these ideas. It's happening at various levels already: anyone carrying an Oyster card around on the Tube today, for example, has the same amount of memory in their pocket as one of Clive Sinclair's ZX81 computers from 1981.

This sort of ubiquitous computing (even at the lowest end) offers the possibility that we can build networks of things that talk to each other constantly. This subtle layer of activity will take place outside of our perception, but will have profound implications for our everyday lives – with objects able to assess and regulate themselves and report back on what is happening to them.

So, the idea of an internet fridge in every home may still be an amusing fiction in 2020, but for western city dwellers there is a high likelihood that miniature computers will be baked into every brick, every piece of clothing or item of food.

Those objects could well include people, too. Biotechnology is another area of speedy development, and one that is just beginning to undergo the same revolution as the IT industry did in the 1970s. Understanding the processes of life, and treating organisms like we treat machines, suddenly opens new horizons all around us.

Now the human genome is mapped, for example, we are understanding more and more about it every day. Personal genomic companies are springing up and medicine is on the verge of ambitious advances in both treatment and cure. Certain diseases and syndromes could become a thing of the past in the next decade, while others – if not eradicated – will certainly be more properly understood.

Other areas, such as human enhancement and the production of artificial organs, are moving forward. Engineers are already able to "print" custom bones to order, though sometimes the change is much too fast for our ethical understanding to keep up. That is where the structures of the old world could step in order to slow progress down, as development becomes a game of politics not possibilities.

Politics is also likely to hurt the area where development is, perhaps, most necessary of all: energy. Our oil-based economies are ripe for technological revolution, but the answers today seem only half-baked – and could quite easily stay that way.

While there is a groundswell of entrepreneurs and academics working tirelessly to come up with new answers, it is hard to tell whether the energy landscape will look very different in a decade. The Copenhagen summit is just one example that shows how difficult consensus can be.

Pull up to the bumper

In fact, as we engage in everyday behaviour – watching 3D films with distant friends over our tiny disposable flexi-screens, or getting advance traffic reports streaming in from tiny transmitters hidden in cars and by the roadside – the important theme could be how to use that technology to solve the problems presented by our dwindling natural resources.

Despite the continually falling prices, as physical goods get ever cheaper thanks to the efficiencies afforded by technology, we may find ourselves struggling to hold back. So often we hear about "doing more with less" – soon that may be a battle cry, not a bumper sticker.

Whatever happens, the one thing the world still has in abundance is ingenuity, and while we're unlikely to see those jetpacks any time soon, there's still plenty to look forward to.